Word: villabona
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...Colombia's Cali cartel was a lucrative business opportunity. His main supplier, a drug lord known to him only as "Oscar," was in effect the chairman of the board of a multinational enterprise. Bennett saw himself as chief executive officer of the California subsidiary. He had an associate, Mario Villabona, who had moved from Colombia to California in 1983. Villabona, a protege of Oscar's, amounted to the California president...
Bennett's good fortune began when Oscar instructed Villabona to develop a market for crack in ghetto areas. It was a bold but necessary business decision. By the mid-1980s, the price of powdered cocaine had fallen, in part because sales to affluent whites had peaked. Crack, the tiny smokable rock, could be immensely profitable if it could be moved in huge quantities. Blacks were a tempting new market...
...Villabona somehow selected Bennett to become the Cali group's first connection with black street gangs in the U.S. With Villabona, he swiftly built an empire that by 1988 was moving one ton of cocaine a week and pulling in gross income of up to $4 million a month...
...largesse added to Bennett's overhead, but he could afford it. In 1987, when cocaine prices were at an all-time low, Oscar in Cali was charging Villabona about $10,000 for a kilo. Out of that, Oscar paid Colombian growers and refiners about $3,000 and Mexican smugglers $2,000. He kept $5,000 for himself. In the U.S., Villabona and Bennett charged $12,000 for a kilo and split the profits. Some weeks Bo pocketed $1 million...